There are thousands of shipwrecks around the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. By one estimate, there are at least 8,000. As the first place in North America reached by Europeans during the age of exploration, the rugged coast here has had centuries to ring up its toll of ships and lives lost.

The surge and surface current slosh me around like laundry in a spin cycle. I’m scuba diving on Gadd’s Wall, a precipitous dive site in Bonne Bay, in Western Newfoundland’s Gros Morne National Park, that just may be one of the top dives on the Rock.

It’s that exciting time of the year again. Time to launch two brand new Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism TV ads. The two new chapters of the Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism story, Most Easterly Point and Conversation, highlight the compelling differences that make this province the ideal destination.

Newfoundland and Labrador’s Viking Trail celebrates the place where the first Europeans to make landfall in the Western Hemisphere, Leif Erikson and the Vikings, came in contact with North America’s native people. Around A.D. 1000, Erikson led an expedition that sailed from a Norse village in Greenland to the coast of Labrador then south to Newfoundland.

St. John’s, Newfoundland, is another of Titanic’s homes. On June 8, 1912, a rescue ship returned to St. John’s bearing the last recovered Titanic corpse. For months, deck chairs, pieces of wood paneling, and other relics were reported to have washed up on the Newfoundland coast...

I plunge into the 32-degree waters off Bell Island, Newfoundland and descend with my dive buddy to the S.S. Saganaga. This former iron ore carrier -- along with the S.S. Lord Strathcona, S.S. Rose Castle, and the PLM-27 -- was torpedoed by the German submarine U-513 during World War II. All four ships now lie in a little over 60 feet of water completely upright and intact except for where the torpedoes hit them.

Where on earth can you hike trails for seven days straight that are at once beautifully wild and off the beaten path, yet also accessible and within reach of a comfortable B&B every night? Ruggedly scenic trails, weaving along and above the ocean, affording the occasional sighting of a whale or an iceberg as they hum with history spanning thousands of years?

Lawrence Hill, author of the award-winning Book of Negroes, writes about being bewitched by majestic Gros Morne National Park - and tracing the history of the incomparable Viking settlement L'Anse aux Meadows.

On July 26, 2011 the French Shore Historical Society, based in Conche on the east coast of the Great Northern Peninsula, will officially open a Centre for Textile Art. The purpose of the Centre will be to encourage the art of handmade textile crafts and to promote the art and history of textile-based traditions....

Coinciding with its 40th anniversary in the town of Grand Bank, the Provincial Seaman’s Museum has re-opened after expanding their exhibition size. After nearly losing the museum to a fire, the old is new again.

With a new year comes new Tourism TV! Watch ‘Half Hour’ and ‘500 Years,’ the latest chapters in the continuing Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism story. In Half Hour, we look at the unique half an hour time difference here in NL. In 500 Years, we celebrate the spirit of our capital city, St. John’s, which is one of the oldest in North America, but one of the youngest at heart.

With over 130 root cellars – small storage spaces skillfully built into the hillsides – Elliston has an unusual heritage. Important to many in rural Newfoundland, the root cellars kept vegetables cool, yet frost- free and edible during the long winter months.

It’s late October, 1887. The few meagre crops eked out during the short summer months are in and the frost is quickly coming. God help the family that doesn’t have a proper root cellar!

- Anonymous Bird Island Cove Resident (now Elliston).

As remote as Newfoundland and Labrador probably seemed to some back in the 1800s, invention and know-how were definitely up to snuff!

Rugged, wild and beautiful, the coastal communities of Brigus and Cupids will take you back in time. Rich in culture and history, the two towns are just a stone’s throw from one another, and both are located just an hour outside of St. John’s. Let the townspeople take you in as you explore heritage that has been preserved for hundreds of years. And see for yourself what we’ve been celebrating.

Of all the mariners who set to sea in Newfoundland and Labrador over the centuries, none is more justly famous than Captain Bob Bartlett of Brigus. A noted explorer in his own right, and perhaps the greatest ice pilot who ever lived, Bartlett guided American Commodore Robert Peary to within 150 miles of the North Pole in 1909, at which point Peary set out with one servant to finish the job on foot. Bartlett won numerous awards and spent many summers exploring the Arctic, and had a gift for self-promotion that in the first half of the 20th century made him one of the most famous men alive.